Mockingbird (20 page)

“Go ahead and stare, Toni. It's not like you're sneaking a peek in a drugstore. No one's going to ‘catch' you.” Candy turned another page and held it open.
Tammy & Sue:
a blonde with a ponytail and a brunette with short hair. The blonde had on a letterman's jacket. The brunette was the smaller girl, a winsome knockout wearing a tweed skirt and glasses.
The other girls think Tammy and Sue are boring bookworms. They go off to a frat party, not realizing that our girls have been waiting for a chance to bone up on each other!!!

In the first picture the women were kissing, mouth to mouth. The blonde's jacket was open, her white shirt unbuttoned, her bra peeking out. The brunette's eyes were closed behind her glasses. In the next picture, the brunette's tweed skirt was gone. She was upright on her knees on a bed. The blonde had pulled her panties down. They stretched taut across the gap between her legs, a few inches below the curly hair of her pussy. The blonde had the practiced smile of a professional model. The brunette was a better actress. She seemed vulnerable, her smile half-timid, amazed, hardly daring to feel so much delight. She seemed so happy.

In the third picture the brunette was crouching before the blonde, who now wore only white mid-thigh stockings and a bra she had peeled down so it lay like a hank of white cloth under her enormous breasts. The brunette was sticking her tongue out an inch from her friend's pubic hair. She was still wearing her glasses.

After this it was positions.

The photographer knew his business. Though the blonde had the more outrageous body, it was the smaller-breasted brunette who had by far the more expressive face. He always caught her looks for the camera: her naughty glee, fingering her friend, or her blind, naive ecstasy, pulling the blonde's ponytail tightly between the lips of her vulva.

The brunette never took off her glasses. Her friend never rolled down her stockings. It was impossible to tell which one was Tammy and which was Sue.

“Forget what it says in
Cosmo.
First lesson: guys like to see women fucking each other.”

“Good Lord, these aren't boobs, they're volleyballs.”

Candy said, “Does it turn you on, Toni?”

“Isn't it about five thousand to get your boobs done? I guess she wanted her money's worth.”

Candy gently reached out and turned my face so I had to look at her. “Toni. Does it turn you on?”

I stared blindly at the photographs. One part of me was greedy to take them in, but I couldn't. Embarrassment blinded me. More than embarrassment. Shame. My eyes saw the pictures but my brain slid away from them. “Leave me alone.”

Candy turned the page. A redhead in a nightie lolled on a frilly little-girl's bed with her legs spread. Clown and balloon wallpaper. Stuffed animals all around. Nineteen pretending to be fourteen, I guessed.

“How about her?”

“Candy!”

“Lesson two: they all like young bodies. A lot of them also like the idea of fucking really young girls.”

She flipped forward to the next pictorial. “Lesson three: they like the idea of fucking you in the ass.” In this set of pictures a guy in a NASCAR jumpsuit was fucking a woman in mechanic's overalls. They screwed on, in, and around a cherry-red racing car. You could never see actual penetration, but in several pictures they were clearly supposed to be having anal sex, her sitting in his lap with her back to him, spreading the lips of her vulva with her fingers, obviously in part to show that wasn't where his cock was. His hands grabbed tight on her huge breasts.

“I think you don't know what turns you on,” Candy said. “You can't tell. You can't even think about it.”

“Screw off! Does it turn you on?”

“Yeah. Some of it.” She tapped the anal sex picture. “This one. I like her face. He doesn't do it for me. I could skip these,” she said, pointing to another couple of pictures. She sat down beside me and paged back through the magazine. She passed the young woman pretending to be a schoolgirl. “That's not what it's like when you're a teenager. I don't like what it's selling.” Back to Tammy and Sue. “These two, and that one,” she said, pointing to an early picture, the brunette's hand stealing slowly into the blonde's crotch while the blonde licked at her nipple. “I could be turned on by almost any of them, if I decided to be.”

“Are you mad at me, Candy?”

“Why should I be?”

“Something in your voice. You just . . . you don't seem like yourself.”

Candy said, “You don't know me very well, Toni. You think you do, but you don't.”

The two college girls kissed sweetly and fucked on the page in front of me. I looked back at my sister, sitting beside me in her panties and halter top. “Have you . . .?”

“Had sex with girls? Yeah. More than once. Mostly it's been good, if you're interested. One time, not so good.” Candy drank a sip of her tea. “Ever wonder if maybe you were a repressed lesbian?”

“Candy!”

“You're saying that a lot today.”

“You're being outrageous!”

“Well, the way your dates have gone, you're thirty and still single, turned down marriage to What's-his-name—”

“Steve.”

“Whatever. Maybe you just don't like guys in the sack, but haven't let yourself think about alternatives.”

“Candace Jane!”

She laughed at me. “Just an idle thought. You want an ice cube for your face? You look like you're about to catch fire.”

“Not everybody thinks about sex all the time, you know.”

“Not even me.” Candy put her glass of iced tea down on top of Tammy and Sue. “I decided to lose my virginity at fourteen. May thirtieth, 1984. School had been out three days. I put on my pink halter-top and a pair of tight shorts and I went and sat on the curb by our house until someone stopped.”

“Jesus, Candy. Why?”

“Lots of cars slowed down,” Candy said. “Finally this one guy drove by in a green Duster. His hair was receding and he had put it in a ponytail in back to compensate. He was real nervous and kind of skinny. I thought he was about thirty. He asked if I wanted a ride.” Candy looked at me. “Well, you were always fighting with Momma, Toni. I didn't have the guts for that. You were always the straight A student and you called the shots on the baseball team. I wasn't like that.” She picked up her iced tea, leaving a ring of condensation that wrinkled Tammy and Sue's beautiful young bodies. “Everything had to be out in the open with you. I wasn't like that. I liked secrets. I liked sex. I liked it because it was fun. I liked it because it was dirty and nobody would talk about it. I liked it because I knew Momma was wrong about it. It was somewhere she couldn't follow me.”

“Jesus, Candy. You got into a strange man's
car?
”

“I wasn't being naive, Toni. I didn't think it would be glamorous. I wasn't that stupid. I thought I was pretty worldly about it. He took me back to his apartment, which was a hole. He was so nervous I finally had to ask him if he wanted to do it. When he took off his underwear and I saw his cock, I just couldn't stop giggling.” She laughed and I laughed against my will at the merriment in her eyes. “When we did it he kept asking if I was a virgin and I kept telling him I wasn't and it was okay. I was really tight and really dry and it hurt a lot. He took me home right afterwards. I don't know what he was expecting, but he got chafed something fierce.” She snickered.

“What if you'd gotten pregnant?”

“Momma had me on the pill. She was wrong about sex but she wasn't stupid.”

“God.” I looked at my baby sister, her sad-funny smile and her scent of burnt cinnamon.

“Okay, looking back I admit it was pretty stupid.”

“Unbelievably stupid.”

“But that night I was incredibly happy. I was even happy
because
it hurt. It was supposed to hurt. That made it real. Like getting your ears pierced. You wouldn't feel grown-up if it didn't hurt. It was my passport, you see? It was my ticket to a new world, and you and Momma couldn't get in.”

Candy drank again. “I liked boys better than girls in high school. To be around, I mean. Boys were more like you. They said what they thought and they didn't think too much. Lots of times they were creeps and cowards. They weren't complicated. Of course I got everything wrong.” She flipped casually past Tammy and Sue. “That first guy's name was Randy, by the way. True story.”

I laughed again.

“I fucked a couple of more men early on,” she continued. “But it was the boys I really wanted, those beautiful dirty high school boys with their fingers greasy from French fries. I wanted . . . oh, I don't know. Their mouths that tasted of stolen cigarettes. Their skinny muscly bodies and the hard-ons they totally had no control over. They wanted me and I really liked that. They wanted me. I liked the way they would pretend to touch my tit by accident when we were kissing, the way a boy's dick would buck up in his jeans when I pulled his hand onto my tit and squeezed it there. It was something nobody would talk about. It was something true.”

She shrugged. “Now, as it turns out, there are problems with being the class slut too. Darryl, the first boy I fucked, we did it in his bedroom a couple of times under a big Metallica poster. I must have said something about us being boyfriend-girlfriend now, and he laughed at me. He told me he had a real girlfriend and I wasn't it. He told me real girlfriends didn't let you fuck them. Would you believe I was shocked? Shocked! The whole point about sex was that it was
true,
dammit. All the rest of what they told us was lies and scenes and shit, but this was supposed to be it, the real thing: that skinny little cock, and me letting him put it in me.”

“I feel terrible.” I looked at her. “I had no idea. I didn't know any of this.”

“I know.” She turned the page to Tiffany, the pretend schoolgirl, an innocent with her red-haired pussy showing under the hem of her nightie.
Tonite I turn 19, and the party's between my legs!

I imagined my sister, fourteen years old in some strange man's apartment, her panties around her ankles, looking past his shoulder, running away from our family on her back. “I'm sorry.”

“I think you had exams or something.” Candy shrugged. “Seriously, Toni, you had all that
fighting
to do. All that
winning.
I didn't want you to notice. I didn't want you to know.”

Softly I said, “Did you think I would be ashamed of you?”

Candy's eyes rolled up and she fell back to lie stretched out on the carpet staring at the ceiling. “Are you
deaf?
I didn't want you in my fucking life, Toni. You were already using up most of the available oxygen. I didn't give a damn what you thought of me back then, to be frank. You had your world and you were welcome to it. I just wanted to have something to myself.”

“Oh.”

She sat up and patted my hand. “Hey—the truth is hard. I care what you think of me now. A little, anyway. Especially now.” She glanced at my belly. “I've gotten pretty used to being your sister. This aunt-to-be thing is freaking me out. No, I mean it. I think about it every day.”

“Hunh.” I sipped some iced tea. “Do you know if it's going to be a boy, or a girl?”

“Girl.”

“I didn't want you to tell me! I just wondered if you knew!”

“Oops. Now you know.”

“. . . Damn.”

I touched my belly, and wondered if my baby could feel my hand there. My daughter. Slowly I said, “I think there are some things . . . there are some things a daughter ought to know, that would be hard to hear, coming from her mom.”

“You reckon?” Candy said.

“I do.” I looked back down at the magazine and shook my head. “Mr. Copper, eh?”

“In sex? All of them, sooner or later,” Candy said. “Gods are big that way. Look at that anthropologist of yours. Rick. It's the Preacher in him that you want to fuck, you know.”

“Candy!”

“The Widow . . . She's the one I—” Candy shook her head. “The Widow is a bit hard.” She went looking through the stack of magazines and pulled out another one, called
damage.
There was a bound woman on the cover. She was tightly tied to a bench, facing away from the camera so you could see little of her beyond her bottom, exposed through a pair of panties that had been cut to ribbons. A man in a mask stood over her, holding a long pair of scissors.

Candy flipped the magazine open to a picture of a woman tied to a tree with clothesline. The line was cinched tight at her ankles, her waist, her breasts, and around her throat. Her breasts were normal-sized and droopy. It made the scene much creepier and more real. There was a red rubber ball in her mouth as a gag, and she had wooden clothespins clamped to each of her nipples. She looked scared.

My heart slowed, thumping very hard.

“Lesson four: a lot of men like the idea of hurting women. This picture is kind of exciting,” Candy said quietly. “It's also really wrong. You have to be . . . It isn't Sugar that can enjoy this. Sugar doesn't like raping or being raped. Hurting or being hurt.”

“Jesus Christ, Candy.”

“You can learn to be turned on by this stuff. You can learn to love being . . . violated, if you know how to open up to it. But you have to be very careful. If you don't do it right, it feels bad. It feels horrible if you aren't turned on, and if you do get turned on, that can be horrible too, if you don't handle it just right. And in real life if you do this stuff with a jerk or a psycho, you are getting into some very serious shit.”

I couldn't say anything. I couldn't even open my mouth.

She paged through the magazine and stopped at an ad. This time it wasn't a photograph, just a line drawing of a woman bound and gagged and stuck full of pins. Pins in her belly and genitals and all over her breasts. Her eyes were wide. Underneath the picture it said, “Sexy girls Bound! Gagged! Cut!” It was an ad for a line of comic books. There was an address to send money.

“How can you look at this, Candy?”

“How can you afford not to?”

She closed the magazine. “Of course that's extreme. I've only ever met one guy who wanted to do that stuff to me for real. Looking at the pictures would probably get a lot of guys hard, but they would never do it to a real woman. But you've got to acknowledge it, okay? You have to face the world and look at it and see the truth. The torture stuff, it's not a big part of the truth, but it's there.” She closed the copy of damage and paged through another Hustler, quickly this time. “Ten years ago nobody showed pictures of women's assholes. Now they're everywhere. Lots of pictorials of anal sex. It's the hot taboo in the air today. All men want to try it, but they won't say that out loud. Show them that you want it, they think you're hotter than an oil-field fire.”